Facsimile Machine

To arrange for transmission, he applied metal pins on a cylinder consisting of insulating material. An electric probe transmitted on and off pulses (very much like a telegraph) then scanned the pins.

The receiving station received the pulses and printed the results onto electrochemically sensitive paper that had was impregnated with a chemical solution (similar to his chemical telegraph).

The facsimile machine was able to reproduce poor quality images, however, were not entirely visible at the time because of the lack of quality of the reproduction, mostly from the lack of synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver.

Bain’s patent dated 27 May 1843 was for “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces, and in electric printing, and signal telegraphs” claiming “a copy of any other surface composed of conducting and non-conducting materials can be taken by these means.”

Chemical Telegraph

The speed improvement was vastly superior to the mechanical version, so much that the hand signaling could not keep up with it, and Bain then had to develop a way of signaling with punched paper tape. A speed of 282 words in 52 seconds between Paris and Lille as clocked, a big improvement over the Morse Telegraph of 40 words per minute.

Although the concept was later used by Wheatsone in his automatic sender, the invention never reached the mainstream, partly from the hostility of Samual Morse, the inventor of the manual telegraph, because the paper tape and alphabet use (morose code) fell under his patent.